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David Sprunger

What are Critical Digital Tools, really?

At the heart of it all, Critical Digital Tools (CDTs) are basically those special apps and platforms that organizations rely on. But if you want to dig deep into an organization's digital toolkit, it's crucial to start by getting a sense of the categories these CDTs typically fall into. For most organizations, these CDTs can be neatly grouped into some common categories:


Communication

  • Scheduling

  • Document sharing/collaboration

  • Management

Communication CDTs

  • Email (believe it or not, email is still the “gold standard” for many organizations)

  • Phone

  • Messaging/Chat/Text (can include audio/video)

  • Video Conferencing apps

  • Social Media

  • Packages/Couriers

  • Traditional print (e.g. mail, printed memos, or other documents)

* This may come as a surprise. Is this digital? The answer is technically yes, it is!


Scheduling CDTs

  • Calendaring 

  • Meeting time consensus-building apps (essentially polling people to discover a good meeting time.)

  • Room scheduling (ability to reserve a room/resource at a certain time/date)

Document sharing/collaboration CDTs

  • Productivity suites (shared documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.)

  • Messaging/Chat

  • Networked storage (i.e. an internal server(s) where data is stored/shared)

  • Remote/Cloud storage (i.e. an external server(s) where date is stored/shared)

  • Management CDTs

  • Storage/access to data about you (e.g. employment info, your student records, etc)

  • Storage/access of passwords

  • Financial management (e.g. how money gets spent or received by the organization)

  • Member management (i.e. if you are a supervisor, how you manage your team members, or if your organization manages “memberships,” how you work with members)

  • Project management

Note: Keep in mind that sometimes there’s overlap between the common categories. 


Specialized/Industry-specific CDTs

It's worth noting that depending on the nature of an organization's activities, you'll often come across specific, specialized categories of CDTs. Take colleges like Whitman, for instance. Here, it's pretty standard to find what we call a "Learning Management System" category. This is the fancy term for the app that professors use to dish out course materials to you and your fellow students. At Whitman, our go-to LMS is Canvas, and it's without a doubt one of our essential CDTs!


Now, picture yourself in an internship, say, with the U.S. Forest Service. You might quickly realize that they're all about mapping software, and guess what? Many of their partner organizations are also deep into mapping tech. So, in this industry, "mapping" takes the spotlight as one of the critical digital tools (CDTs).

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